Attn.
Mr José MONTILLA AGUILERA
Ministre of Tourism
P° de la Castellana, 160,
28071 MADRID
Ms Carmen CALVO PYATO
Ministre of Culture
Plaza del Rey, 1,
28071 MADRID
Mr Miguel Ángel MORATINOS CUYAUBÉ
Ministre of Foreign Affairs
C. Francisco Sivela, 82,
Palacio de la Trinidad
28071 MADRID
Carcassonne, June 19th, 2006
Dear Madam, dear Sirs:
For three years a Spanish week has taken place in the citiy of Carcassonne (France) in the last week of August. The only reason why this takes place is to provide the bull-fights which have taken place in the last three years in our city--hat had overcome bull-fights for fourty-eight years--with a mock hispanic background.
Before bull-fights reappeared in our city, no Spanish week whatsoever had ever been planned.
Does it now help us to get to know Spain any better? In order to promote Spain's tourism? No. For people to discover ist culture, past or present, artistic or intellectual? No. To get in contact with its inhabitants or its nature? No. It is only about drinking, eating, having fun and tempting people to assist bull-fights, which are presented as the basic entertainment and precondition to other entertainments. The sole and admitted goal is this: no feria without bull-fights, no bull-fight without feria, and both representing Spain.
Spain = corrida = fiesta ou feria.
Isn't it unjust and humiliating for your country to be systematically assimilated and thus reduced to this sole custom of bull-fights?
What about Spain's treasures of history, monuments, architecture, landscapes, artists, scientists, thinkers, sportsmen, undertakers? Where is modern and progressive Spain, becoming a model of access to a European scale humanism?
We love the Spain that has had the courage to dismiss an increasing number of its customs issued from fascinating ideologies whose values were those of bull-fight: nobility of fight, sublimation of suffering, aesthetics of domination, exaltation of death, purity of the race, symbolic ceremonies, national traditions, archaic myths, and further dangerous and dispiriting nonsense.
We would wish for you to denounce this amalgamation to the mayor of Carcassonne and to ask him to stop mixing the Spanish flag with bull-fight ferias, to stop reducing your country by suspicious amalgamations and to stop invoking Spain to justify bull-fights in the name of a mock pretended common mediterranean identity.
With respectuous regards,
yours faithfully,
Denis Boulbès
Representative of CCAC
